Hi!

I use org-mode quite a lot of most things and also have a number of "workflows" in my setup, use columnview quite a lot, and also have the habit of entering whatever text I need to write to resolve an issue under the item in org-mode format (quite convenient, then I can just export the subtree and send it as mail).

I have frequently run up against the issue that when trying to generate a column view for a file, it aborts with a strange error. Since this has become more frequent lately, I decided to resolve it.

It turns out that if you have something that looks like this:

* Top level
** TODO something

*** Proposal

Blabla

*** Submitted

Some more blaha.

and you have "SUBMITTED" as one of your todo keywords, this line will be interpreted as an item with a keyword but no headline. Since a lot of code assumes that there is always a headline, many functions can get a "nil" as a headline, failing miserably.

I solved this issue by requiring that there should always be a headline text (this is after all an assumption made in the code) and rewrote the org-complex-heading-regexp accordingly.

Patch is attached.

Just my few cents,
Mats Kindahl

-- 
Senior Principal Software Developer
Oracle, MySQL Department